How Grofers leveraged cloud platform to fuel business growth

In his book, Scaling Up, bestselling business author Verne Harnish said: to move faster, organizations must pulse faster. Grocery delivery startupGrofers has taken to heart the words of Verne Harnish.

The Gurgaon- based firm operates in the on-demand delivery space and works on a marketplace model to replace the customers trip to grocery stores by bringing offline retailers online and their inventory online. Operating in 19 cities across the country, Grofers provides grocery, fruits and vegetables, cosmetics, electronics, bakery items, flowers and pet supplies on its app. It processes over 15,000 orders in a day.

With technology and operations being the backbone of its business model, Grofers completely appreciates the importance of infusing agility into its business processes.

For Grofers, agility is both a business imperative and a competitive edge. The startup is trying to gain elbow room in an already cluttered marketplace. The online grocery market is growing at a brisk clip.

According to a recently released report by India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), India's online grocery market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 62% between 2016-2022. The overall grocery market in the country is worth over Rs 21,60,000 crore, making India the sixth largest grocery market in the world. The online sales are expected to reach around 2 % of the overall grocery market by 2020, creating a potential market size of around Rs 60,000 crore following the surge in the number of players operating in the industry.

This explains why so many start-ups are muscling their way into the on-demand delivery market. Grofers, for one, doesn’t want to lag behind. And in order to trot along at a brisk pace, the startup needs a lot of support from its internal engineering team that builds the technology infrastructure. Predictably so. Technology infrastructure often puts a spanner in the works of business growth.

Conventionally, companies have a central team for procuring, setting up and maintaining infrastructure. This decelerates the go- to- market process. Grofers wanted its technology infrastructure to support its growth ambitions. So it strode off the beaten track. “We decided to not set up such a team and instead build a solid team of software developers and equip them with tools built in-house. This where cloud computing came to our rescue,” says Vaidik Kapoor, Infrastructure Lead, Grofers.

“Every developer is capable of provisioning infrastructure on-demand on the AWScloud platform, using these internal tools built on multiple open-source technologies like Ansible, Consul, InfluxDB, Elasticsearch for orchestration, service health monitoring, instrumentation,” he further adds.

Initially, Grofers had a few servers manually set up by staff with some sysadmin experience. But, post-cloud deployment, the tools it built in-house enabled its engineers to launch and manage hundreds of servers, without the intervention of any sysadmins.

As of today, Grofers is running 200 to 300 servers, varying on the demand to keep up with the traffic. It has recycled over 3000 servers over a period of time. None of this requires the involvement of any sysadmin. In fact, the company does not have any sysadmins anymore.

Before migrating to the cloud, Grofers would take weeks to go to market with a new service or product. They would need to account for the infrastructure setup time or get delayed because of the inherent constraints of their infrastructure.

“Usually, this would take anything between 3 days to a week depending upon availability of the sysadmin. The infrastructure set up time is now considered as development time. The maximum turnaround time for even complex infrastructures is one day. Engineers experienced with the tooling have also launched multiple services on completely new infrastructure multiple times on the same day. This also gives our engineers confidence and freedom to experiment and try new things very quickly,” he shares.

Cloud has also helped Grofers jump the skill gap. There’s no need to worry about hardware failures at all as the infrastructure is completely abstracted out by AWS and failures are not visible. Dealing with hardware failures requires skills that are difficult to find in the market. “In our current team, we don't have the need for that skill at all,” admits Kapoor.

Grofers is heavily dependent on the auto-scaling features of the cloud. With scalability taken care of, it doesn’t have to fret over traffic surges. “In our business, surges on the weekends is a pattern. Without this kind of setup, our team would be busy manually scaling up servers before the weekend begins. That's about 30% saved in firefighting and infrastructure maintenance. We are now busy solving more business problems than infrastructure problems,” he states.

Any tech product requires a testing environment where any change is tested before releasing it to the world. Grofers is saving 30% cost month-on-month on its testing infrastructure.

The cloud platform has truly liberated Grofers and made it nimble enough to move fast in a dynamic business environment.